Social networks are gaining increasing momentum and market importance in the Internet. The current paradigm is that of centralized or web-based social networks. According to this paradigm, a number of users create communities to interact and share content online by accessing a centralized web-site, which acts as a central repository that exposes the resources that each user uploads to share with the community.
Recently, a number of technologies in peer-to-peer (P2P) networking have been developed which will enable a decentralized P2P paradigm of social networking. In this paradigm, users will be able to easily organize their resources (e.g. devices, services, content, contacts) to form personal networks, and use these to interact and share with other people's personal networks. In contrast to the centralized social networking one, this paradigm relies on no central repository that exposes the resources of each user to the community. Instead, content and services are exposed directly by the user's own devices, often in real-time as they are created.
One of the challenges in the P2P social networking paradigm is that service and content discovery can no longer rely on some central authority, but must be supported by the user's devices in a P2P manner. Furthermore, because P2P social networking involves users' own personal devices, contacts, and content/services therein, there is a much more urgent need to protect user privacy by controlling who can discover what among the list of resources owned by each user. Most widely-used discovery frameworks do not incorporate any access control or security mechanism, making it impossible for users to control what others can discover.
Therefore, there is a need in P2P social networking for a new resource discovery framework that is suitable for decentralized P2P networks and incorporates security to protect users' privacy and information.